Quality of care in longer term mental health institutions in Poland

Abstract

Objective

Development of Quality Indicator for Rehabilitative Care (QuIRC), experiences of Polish partner in implementation of the toolkit and preliminary assessment of care standards in longer term mental health institutions. Research constitutes a part of international project funded by European Commission.

Methods

Polish version of QuIRC has been tested in 20 psychiatric units across 3 regions in Poland. Selected facilities differed in terms of employment profile, living standards as well as location and service users turnover. Managers of participating units were interviewed using the refined tool with 145 items regarding domains indentified during previous phases of the DEMoB.inc project. Each participant was questioned by a single researcher during face-to-face meeting. Lacking answers were completed on basis of service users’ medical files and account departments’ documents when necessary.

Results

Manager of only 1 out of 21 units refused to participate in interview. The most common difficulties in data collection were in relation to the number of staff and staff training. These difficulties may be due to differences in the work patterns and training of staff in Polish units compared to other countries. In comparison to international results important differences in preliminary assessments of long term mental health care were found in several areas probably due to the early stage of deinstitutionalisation process in Eastern Europe. Development of the web based version of the toolkit will facilitate its implementation in research as well as internal assessments for units’ restructuring purposes.